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Month: March 2008

So T want­ed shrimp for din­ner, a sim­ple request — nor­mal­ly I’d go to the one decent seafood place in Ben­salem but pressed for time I went to Acme — nev­er my first choice, ser­vice is chal­leng­ing on the best of days there. So there I am stand­ing at the fish counter — behind me I can hear a gag­gle of deli-ladies par­ty­ing like it’s 1999, but over their noise I couldn’t attract any atten­tion — sud­den­ly the fish wait­ers num­bers grew (we were 2, then short­ly there­after we formed a quar­tet of pissed off Pesc­etar­i­ans) Even­tu­al­ly I did the only thing I could think to do, I went look­ing for a man­ag­er.

10 min­utes lat­er I’m explain­ing to the man­ag­er the issue and invit­ed him to come stand with us at the fish counter, so he could ‘ful­ly soak in the full Acme expe­ri­ence’ — about 4 min­utes after that I had my order of shrimp — The man­ag­er made it very clear — he had no expla­na­tion for the bad ser­vice — nor did he make any excus­es, — I total­ly respect that.

If the expe­ri­ence had end­ed there I would have been sat­is­fied, chalk­ing the expe­ri­ence up as a stan­dard trip to the Acme — but after I paid and was head­ed towards the door — the same man­ag­er stopped me, invit­ed me over to the cus­tomer ser­vice desk — and pro­ceed­ed to ring me up a Acme gift-card for the incon­ve­nience — telling me that he’s sor­ry for my neg­a­tive expe­ri­ence and he hopes the gift-card would encour­age me to give Acme anoth­er chance. A pret­ty classy move.